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Heading into summer, your child is probably going to bring a lot of papers and projects home—and likely you have been accumulating a pile of schoolwork and keepsakes over the course of the year. Trying to figure out how to store children’s school papers? This is definitely the time to do it.

If you don’t have a system, you need one. That means picking up a few supplies. Your best bet is to pick up a few plastic containers for paperwork along with some file folders.

You now will need to think of some categories. When it comes to how to organize keepsake papers, there are a lot of approaches you can take, but it is going to depend in part on the structure of your family. Are you organizing just one child’s keepsakes, or do you have a few kids? With one kid, you may only need one or two bins (I suggest two—more on that in a second). With multiple kids, you need plastic storage containers for papers for each of them.

Folders can be labeled in a couple of different ways:

• By school year
• By course
• By type of work (i.e. creative writing in one folder, artwork in another, essays in a third, and so on)

Why did I suggest that you get at least two bins per child? Most years, there is going to be work that you want to keep and work that your child wants to keep. Oftentimes, they will be different items.

If you get a couple of bins, you can keep the stuff you want to save that your child is not interested in preserving. The other bin you can give directly to your child to store anything he or she wants to hold onto. That way the different keepsakes you both save will not clutter each others’ collections. This also allows you both to use organizational systems that you prefer. You might organize your bin by year for example, while your child chooses to organize by type of work or personal level of pride or some other method which wouldn’t necessarily work for your bin.

Now and again, it is wise to go through and cull the collection. Items that seemed super important one year may not seem so a few years later (like a high grade on an exam once the knowledge demonstrated has been long exceeded).

If you still want to preserve these items but do not want the paper clutter, photograph them, and store them digitally. This allows you to always have the images to reference, great for bringing back unexpected memories. It also means that you never need to throw away a child’s artwork ever again.

Getting children’s school papers organized can be quite overwhelming, especially if you have past years to catch up on. But once you have a system in place, it will help both you and your child to appreciate your child’s accomplishments and celebrate them over the years to come.